The province of Punjab is the main food basket of India. In recent years, many regions of Punjab are facing acute waterlogging problems and increased secondary salinity, which have negative impacts on food security of the nation. In particular, these problems are more pronounced in the Muktsar district of Punjab. The observed groundwater levels trend between 2005 and 2011 implies that groundwater levels are coming towards the land surface at the rate of 0.5 m/year in Lambi and Malout blocks.

Planetary warming may be exacerbated if it accelerates loss of soil carbon to the atmosphere. This carbon-cycle–climate feedback is included in climate projections. Yet, despite ancillary data supporting a positive feedback, there is limited evidence for soil carbon loss under warming. The low confidence engendered in feedback projections is reduced further by the common representation in models of an outdated knowledge of soil carbon turnover.

Soil series representing different physiographic units were studied to know the impact of temporal change in land use and cropping system on some soil properties in the northwestern parts of the Indo-Gangetic Plain. The dynamics in land use and cropping system for the period 1983–84, 1996–97 and 2007–2008 and change in soil properties for the period 1983 and 2008 were studied. In Singhpur soil series developed on Shiwalik hills, the soil organic carbon (SOC) content decreased from 0.69% in 1983 to 0.40% in 2008 on account of increased deforestation and soil erosion.

The Naga Foundation aims to implement durable re-greening interventions to increase local soil sustainability and regional water availability. When this is done on a large enough scale such landscape changes may also lead to positive regional climate impacts. Naga is developing a plan to re-green 15 large areas in Eastern Africa, creating a so-called hydrological corridor. Four potential hydrological corridors have been identified in Kenya and Tanzania, all four of them around Mount Kilimanjaro.

Christmas Island has been mined for rock phosphate for over 100 years, and as mining will finish in the next few decades there is a need to develop alternative economies on the island, such as high value crop production. However, to conserve the unique flora and fauna on the island, only land previously mined will be considered for this purpose. As these soils have been severely perturbed by mining, strategies to improve soil quality parameters need to be undertaken before plant based industries can be considered.

Dedicated biomass crops are required for future bioenergy production. However, the effects of large-scale land use change (LUC) from traditional annual crops, such as corn-soybean rotations to the perennial grasses (PGs) switchgrass and miscanthus on soil microbial community functioning is largely unknown. Specifically, ecologically significant denitrifying communities, which regulate N2O production and consumption in soils, may respond differently to LUC due to differences in carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) inputs between crop types and management systems.